The Sane Lunatic

Woah! It's almost the end of April and this is only my second post this year that isn't a movie review. Am I getting old and boring or simply more careful of what I openly express in this increasingly dangerous and intolerant social atmosphere? Or maybe just a little lazy with putting thoughts into written form. Meh. Time for a personal update from the Sane Loon and it's not a good one as you can guess from the title of this blog. I don't even know how many real people read this and how many are just page-pings from bots trawling the worldwide web, but I feel like it helps me get things off my chest here without losing much of my privacy. Getting back to the title of this post, 'Breaking Point'. I'd assume that many of you like me have come across this expression before and most probably on some news channel with a story describing the volatile state of some nation or the other. Or maybe in a novel that has some intense circumstances. Nonetheless, he...

The movie that I've been waiting for more than any Marvel flick, got delayed by two weeks in my town before finally being available to watch in IMAX 3D, this is it - Ready Player One. If you're like me and you never knew about the book it is based on by the same name (written by Ernest Cline), here are two simple incentives - it's about video games and it's directed by Steven Spielberg. The narrative is set in a semi-dystopian future of 2045 where the world is on the brink of chaos, where instead of living in the depressing reality, people have found hope and salvation in the virtual reality universe called OASIS, made by an eccentric genius of gaming technology James Halliday (Mark Rylance). In the OASIS, the only limit is one's imagination as the universe allows people to create while also harbouring an extensive range of pop culture references. With time, the OASIS grew and evolved to the extent of having real-world implications. The skills and objects in t...

Yep. The Loon watched a new Hindi movie, first since 'Trapped' and for the same pitch: it's not your typical Bollywood movie. 'October' is the work of Shoojit Sircar (director and producer) and Juhi Chaturvedi (screenplay) and is an interesting piece of film. It's a bit tricky to tell you about the movie without giving away possible plot points even though it is no murder mystery. 'October' deals with a very real circumstance, an unfortunate circumstance, that many people deal with in many different forms. The narrative revolves around Dan (Varun Dhawan) a Hotel Management course student in his final semester, undergoing work training at a *top* hotel in Dwarka and how he deals with the daily struggles alongside his friends and fellow interns. One such colleague is the younger student, Shiuli (Banita Sandhu) who appears to be everything that Dan isn't - smart, reliable, responsible and an overall good person.  It all changes when on New...

Most of us would probably recognize John Krasinski as Jim from the US version of The Office, a docustyle sitcom, or as a hunk of American military muscle from his recent role in '13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi'. But what we would not associate with him is horror, and until recently, neither would he. Now in 2018, John makes a triple treat debut to the genre as he directs, writes and stars in - 'A Quiet Place'. The premise is simple yet brilliant - our world being overrun by a species that attacks sound. But the movie follows a traditional scope of the genre by focussing on a small group of people, one family to be precise and their struggle for survival. Now, if your life depends on how quiet you can live, move, work and all other unavoidable functions, the biggest task would be handling small kids in such a situation and the main characters of this film, the Abbots, have three . I'll admit, I missed the introductory five minutes of the film...

After one of the best Hollywood films about giant fricking monsters against giant fricking robots came out in 2013, Pacific Rim finally gets its much-awaited sequel — Pacific Rim: Uprising. The core attraction remains the same with more big, fricking robots and even bigger monsters bashing it out and decimating cityscapes in their wake, but everything else is pretty much new. We follow the story from the point of view of Jake Pentecost (John Boyega from the new Star Wars films) who is the son of the first instalment's badass, Stacker Pentecost (played by Idris Elba). It's a typical kid-under-the-shadow-of-his-dad's-legacy, one who saved the world at that. Ten years after the bridge was closed and the war was won, most of the destroyed coastal cities are still wastelands. Settlements of looters with barter exchange in place of a monetary system in order to acquire resources like food and shelter. Scavenging Jaegers (name of the giant frickin robots) for parts was the ...

Another weekend, another remake. This one is a relatively ill-timed reiteration of an action classic - Death Wish. The iconic role played out by Charles Bronson of being a manly vigilante is now played by the only old-looking badass that isn't bulky: Bruce Willis. It's pretty much the same story brought forward to the current times. Shooting related crimes and deaths are high in Chicago so it's the location for the plot. Bruce Willis plays a well-renowned surgeon by the name of Paul Kersey who has worked hard and lives with his beautiful wife Lucy (Elizabeth Shue) and daughter Jordan (Camila Morrone) in a big home, has nice cars and everything is going well for him. Then one night, a band of thieves are at the Kersey residence and it all goes wrong when the robbers confront Paul's wife and daughter. Lucy agrees to their terms to hand over all the valuables but while she's opening the safe, one of the robbers watching Jordan starts trying to molest her. Jordan...

A new Marvel hero getting his own solo film, even though he was introduced in the insanely epic Captain America: Civil War ( review here ), it's finally time for the Black Panther to dig its claws into the MCU. After all the hype and the incredible teasers from the trailers, it finally came and it delivered in every promise of being an entertainment spectacle. Chadwick Boseman returns as T'Challa, the King of Wakanda, aka Black Panther in a story that carries on from his introduction as the prince, who unveiled his badass vibranium black suit of armour while chasing the Winter Soldier. T'Challa is young but wise, a good man, and after his father was assassinated by Sargeant Barnes, it was his turn to take the throne. Wakanda has a massive reserve of the alien metal known as vibranium, the toughest metal on Earth and is the same stuff that Cap's shield is made out of. The meteor of vibranium had affected the land itself, making it fertile, while offering many mo...